Backswing
by jxnim
Summary: [OC-Insert] Grandma wasn't an I-told-you-so kind of person, but I'd give anything to see the look on her face if I could only tell her just how right she was. Not that that in and of itself is funny; if everything Grandma believed was right, then I don't know what it says about me and my situation. It's... great.


As you can tell, this is another reincarnation OC-Insert fic. It is entirely self-indulgent and I will be doing minimal research and putting in minimal effort, because I think it will be good for me to have a trash piece to work on when I'm sorting through writer's block or trying to relieve some stress. Also I don't care about canon and you should just ignore any mistakes because I will not fix them (unless they're overly disruptive). Of course, the idea was inspired by numerous other similar works, mostly Dreaming of Sunshine by Silver Queen, Catch Your Breath by Lang Noi and What Doesn't Kill You by zbluez. For the last one I was really inspired by the idea of Orochimaru's soul experimentation leading to an interdimensional anomaly, so I adopted it and changed it around to suit this piece.

Naruto is something like a comfort anime to me; I experienced it during a time when I was very impressionable and also kind of lonely, so a lot of the characters and storylines are near and dear to my heart. That being said I am able to look at the current state of affairs and recognize that things aren't looking so good, or maybe that they never were really good and I was just a dumb kid looking for dumb entertainment. So it's easier for me to experience it now through the degree of separation that comes with my memory, which is why I will basically begin ignoring canon eventually, and also maybe miss a couple of details. Whatever. If you don't care, you'll have more fun reading this.

Before I was born the first time around, my grandmother had been a devout Buddhist. It was only after my Christian mother married into the family and converted all of her children that she begrudgingly started attending church. She never fully gave it up, though. She would invite me on her weekly trips to the soup kitchen to hand out plates of food and lovingly wrapped sandwiches to anyone who asked, and I followed because I loved her.

"Baby, always remember to be kind to others. Do it for your karma, yes, that you might live a better life, but do it for the people first." She'd say, and hand me a slice of whatever fruit they were serving that day.

Grandma wasn't an I-told-you-so kind of person, but I'd give anything to see the look she'd give my mother if I could only see her again and tell her just how right she was. Not that that in and of itself is funny; if everything Grandma believed _was_ right, then I don't know what it says about me and my situation. Good karma equals a step up in the chain of reincarnation, or at least the same status, right? I don't think I tipped the scales too drastically one way or the other in my first life, but the state of my rebirth begs to differ. In fact, I'd even venture to say that it's a little unfair, the lot I ended up with.

In the first few seconds after opening my eyes to new life, I had experienced more immediate danger and bodily harm than I ever had in all of my 19 years of previous living. My entire body burned - I could almost trace the outline of my nervous system with how pure and splitting the agony was. It was worse than any broken bone, worse than the actual crash that had killed me. I opened my mouth to scream and choked on the strange fluid that rushed into my mouth, flailing in panic until I realized that the fluid was also _in _my lungs and somehow I wasn't drowning. I opened my eyes as wide as I could but everything was still so frustratingly blurry that nothing made visual sense.

I realized later that I had woken up in the incubator way earlier than I was supposed to. According to Orochimaru (for it was him, with his serpentine soul, that had pulled me from my resting place and chained me to a new plane of existence), the soul-binding had taken place during the fetus's late stages of development, the equivalent of the second half of the third trimester in the womb. My theory is that my soul, unused to the sensation of developing and active chakra coils, had jerked itself to consciousness in a desperate blind fight for survival.

Thankfully, I didn't spend very long in that awful tube. The next time I opened my eyes I was in what looked like a child's hospital room, complete with picture books and those wooden alphabet blocks, except with Japanese _kana_ in place of English.

I was lying on my back on a short cot with an oxygen line in my nose. I felt strangely energetic, none of the usual fatigue I associated with waking up clinging to my muscles. I breathed deep and slow, not yet registering the implications of that, and pulled myself upright.

As I moved I caught a glimpse of my reflection in one of the walls, which was glass for observation, and froze. A toddler with a shaved head and too-light eyes stared back at me with their mirror-bright eyes. I threw the covers aside and approached the glass, trembling as the child copied my every move, right down to the shiver.

That… was me. I was the child.

At this point, my rational mind and my acting body separated. Internally I was terrified and bewildered, struggling to process the situation, but my body moved itself back to bed into the same position I had woken up in as if I could pretend I had never seen myself.

_Just stay dead, _I thought hysterically. _Close your eyes and go back to being dead. _

If only things had been so simple.

My rebirth was around the time Orochimaru began experimenting with alchemy and soul-science, maybe a year or so after he'd been booted out of Konoha. It's remarkable that I survived at all, actually. From what I remember of him, he was prone to fits of rage and frustration when his hypotheses were proven incorrect, or if an experiment fell through, wherein any equipment or living subjects nearby were at risk of being destroyed. And I was far from a smashing success; there were all sorts of things wrong with the incongruence between my body and soul that fucked up how I generated chakra. My chakra coils were mutated beyond function, which was some strange result of my old soul's lack of spiritual energy and my new body's predisposition for unnaturally large stores of physical chakra. I required a kind of life support to survive, in the form of two seals tattooed on the base of my skull and the space between my shoulders. They supplemented my mangled coils with ambient chakra, collected and filtered for the Yin energy I couldn't produce myself.

I think I was a kind of prototype to him, though. Evidence that soul-binding _did_ work, and that his theory of the multiverse was correct as well. A trophy in a test tube, in the form of a living toddler.

When life gives you lemons, am I right?

I didn't actually see very much of Orochimaru when I was in his lab. I regained consciousness years after the soul transfer had been completed, in the body of a young toddler, physically helpless and extremely disoriented. He tended to disappear for long periods of time; I get the feeling that he was easily bored, even with how obsessive he could be. Once he felt that he had conquered a certain subject, uncovered all there was to know about it, he discarded it without a second thought. It was a strange kind of mercy, especially as he delved deeper and deeper into the realm of human experimentation. He could be sadistic and cruel, but never without a purpose, so once he finished with an experiment survivors were left to exist in an odd tenuous peace.

The lab that I was reborn in was also something that he tired of eventually. Instead of just abandoning it, though, which would have left too many loose ends, he began the process of sorting things into Keep and Discard piles, so to speak. I didn't want to go with him, wherever he was moving. By this time I had figured out where I was and who he was, and I wasn't inclined to follow him. But even worse was the thought that I could be discarded. Cleaning up the equipment he didn't need was a simple matter; it was all sealed away into neat little scroll bundles. Cleaning up his living subjects, though…

I didn't want to be discarded. Death I was ambivalent towards, but pain… I was still very much afraid of pain.

He approached me last, I think, having finally decided what to do with me. I could feel my pulse race and my eyes water in an infantile reaction, and I whimpered soundlessly as he entered my room.

I was sitting on my cot as I usually was, but he still had to squat fully to the ground to meet my eye level.

"Such a shame," he mused. "If only I had more time to observe…"

I said nothing. I couldn't.

His hand descended and touched the center of my forehead and then everything was blissfully dark once more.


End file.
